A Feminist-Infused NFT Protocol? Why the (music) market needs one [Part 1]
Since entering the wild west of NFTs in 2021, the euphoria expressed in the NFT community was always mixed with my own Black girl skepticism. Not of the technology, but humanity. Since when has technology ever nurtured our social nature for the better? It’s certainly made tasks easier and devices smaller. But, the direction and usage of technology, as imagined by the limited viewpoint of those who have traditionally swam in power, only designate the lanes and shape of the pool. I use this metaphor to say, that no matter how hard we swim we are still just doing laps and going nowhere.
I’m not here to challenge the financial blessings Web3 has offered artists. We creatives deserve all that’s due. I challenge the tension between the promise of Web3 and our inability to meet it because of the priorities of tech and its capitalist caretakers, who can’t move beyond what they trust will work; for the usual few.
Artist bags aside, let’s talk about how the Web3 industry, protocols, and platforms have not really changed the game, they just gave shiny new board pieces to the same players. The art world just became more of itself; elitist AF with its Superares and the lot. And despite this, black NFT artists use getting on the platform as a CV goal. Announcing you are the first black person or woman, for that matter, on a platform in 2022 is a backhanded slap stating nothing has changed.
Music, still numb in the ass from the past 20 years and not knowing what the hell to do with Web3, just followed art to become unlike itself. Again bags aside, the concept of “music as art” has worked for the first-in and talented few, but the bear market quickly showed us how little crypto holders understand the value of music. The main music platforms, those I love more than others, still focus on singles; meaning artists need to drop a song to get a bag. Sounds like an NFT version of living paycheck-to-paycheck or gig to gig.
Platforms are judged on how fast they can sell the music because artists are then valued on how fast their drops sell out. The bulk of the market is valued on speed and how much time you spend in Spaces lying to people about the quality of their music. Sorry, had to slip that dig in there. Read more about the psychological Jedi tricks of the NFT music market and traditional music industry in my Medium article NFTs Killed the Pop Star.
At least a few times a week, in any given Music NFT Twitter Spaces, someone will theorize who will be the Spotify of NFTs. Well guess what, Spotify will be the Spotify of NFTs, and why exactly is that a goal? Why is that a goal for platform builders and the expectation of artists? We are still on some 90s, move fast and break shit, early 20th-century monopoly scaled growth mindset and the eternal art and artist as a commodity rope-a-dope. Every music NFT platform is centralized; which is not a bad thing, but can they operate harmoniously with decentralized ideals?
Both artists and platform builders are working from a 20th-century business model dressed in 21st-century drag.
Technology only dares us to change and for that to happen we have to start acknowledging that we may be too much of a patriarchal framed society based on domination, to see the direction in which Web 3, 4, 5… will go. Tech can only go as far as a founder’s or coder's cultural limitations and viewpoint. This is why diversification is pressed for the benefit of both business and consumer and is not some new form of affirmative action. How do we build in Web3, where change is felt holistically, not just monetarily for the few…again? We start by taking more of our humanity to the protocol itself.
THE CHALLENGES WITH MUSIC
What challenges or problems does independent music face in Web3?
[PART 1 — Economic Accessibility]
]1 ) Way too overpriced for the average music lover
[PART 2 — A Return to a Fan Market]
2) A limited and speed-driven collector market who themselves have no consensus where value lives in #musicnfts.
3) Onboarding a Web2 fanbase and marketing
4) And lastly, no proven blueprints or standards for artists to lean on when envisioning their careers for the long haul.
These issues don’t just stem from our awkward beginnings with this new technology; some have been here since Tin Pan Alley and Race records. And yet still a century of tech ingenuity hasn’t addressed any of them, if not made our life more complicated, compromised our mental health, and distracted many artists from the work of culture creation. Well, I’m here to argue and over the next year, test, doc, and prove that one of the answers lies with the application of the F word. Feminism.
Whoah now Hanifah, what does burning bras have to do with Web3 tech? Everything that’s new and truly refreshing.
THE INFAMOUS F WORD
First let’s catch ya up to what Feminism is NOT, only:
- White women burning bras,
- just for women,
- a strictly political movement,
- a fight to be equal with men at work and in society
I mean yeah, it has and still is all those things in practice and herstory, but where Feminism takes off for me is its approach to problem-solving, prioritization, and accessibility.
I am a black queer woman, but even I at one time considered Feminism a dirty word. It was and still is deeply misunderstood in most communities of color, and threatens many men regardless of race. So much so, that I was resistant to use the word in the title of this article knowing it may be off-putting for many. I thought about using Womanism which is a term used among black women as if that would make a difference? So I’ll just work with the popular word to slide past semantics and get to the point. I understand some of you reading this may be skeptical, but hey you made it this far so roll with me.
How does Feminism show up in protocol and why do we need it?
We will focus on music protocol since it is the lane I occupy as an artist and builder, the art that needs the most guidance and is most likely to become the art of mass adoption for Web3.
This article is the first in a series that will document my exploration and implementation of a new music protocol. And with it, introduce a new NFT collection named Beam Me Down Music(BMD) that will be the launch project for the Beats Per Mint (BPM) music NFT market platform. They both debut this Holiday season and are built using the Unlock subscription protocol .
I will use this article series to do the following:
- test and show how this new feminist-infused protocol addresses each of the above-mentioned challenges within the music NFTs ecosystem;
- each article will also be minted for archive and fundraising purposes;
- and at the end of each article will be a POAP opportunity to gain your invitation to be a part of the first cohort of artists to use it (note POAPs, forthcoming);
- Beats Per Mint will be a public good as I hope it to become a standard to which other NFT marketplaces are built.
The Unlock Subscription Model
The Beat Per Mint Platform will be built on top of the Unlock Subscription protocol. Let’s start with what Unlock brings to the table. Unlock, in my opinion, is, by default, a feminist product in spirit.
Disclaimer: Beam Me Down is a grantee of Unlock meaning they will be matching funds raised for the project in the next and subsequent Gitcoin rounds. You can look over our grant here and support it now if ya want. Gitcoin round 15 begins officially Sept. 7 2022
As stated on their site; “Unlock’s mission is about taking back subscription and access from the domain of middlemen — from a million tiny silos and a handful of gigantic ones — and transforming it into a fundamental business model for the web.”
So essentially all that you have used subscriptions for in Web2, including email collection, they have built a protocol expanding that model to be applied to all of the immutable, token-gating attributes of blockchain technology.
Also stated; “the Unlock Protocol can be applied to publishing (paywalls), newsletters, software licenses or even the physical world, such as transportation systems. The web revolutionized all of these areas — Unlock will make them economically viable.”
They are bridging our Web2 monetization sensibilities with our Web3 vision. You can integrate and use what they call “locks” (NFTs) with platforms like Shopify, Wordpress, Webflow and Discord. They have unending subscriptions and limited ones. People can subscribe using credit cards or crypto (nothing new there but luckily not omitted from the protocol). What I appreciate most is that these are not NFTs necessarily rooted in flipping culture or viewing NFTs as an asset, but NFTs as access; which is the ocean I swim in.
In my journey to finding a protocol that provides options for music, Unlock was an innovative foundation to work from, for more reasons than just the protocol. I was introduced to Unlock by its Head of Dev Relations, Angela Steffens. A chance Twitter Spaces encounter lead to a Zoom convo then to lunch at Peaches in Brooklyn during NFTNYC. My NFT collection Beam Me Down Music eventually became an Unlock grantee project. As I‘ve’ gotten to know some of the core team like Chris Carfi and Patrick Workman, who have been incredibly on-hands and helpful, I then realized they have stayed small on purpose and aren’t necessarily for profit. Clutch the pearls!!
At the point when Angela and I were eating at Peaches, I had envisioned simply using Unlock as it is, a monthly subscription protocol for musicians. It could provide monthly revenue that would grow as the subscriber base grew. But then I was honest with myself as an artist. The idea of an unending monthly obligation to create experiences for my fanbase gave me ajada. Ugh, this is the same mind games of Web2. The constant grind and allegiance to the screen instead of the studio or stage. That felt like a familiar trap that leads to resentment and burnout.
The Beam Me Down Music NFT Collection
What if I used Unlock’s limited subscriptions instead? So time is a feature, not a factor. It would make room for project-oriented NFTs and album drops (almost nonexistent in the space) or more long-term visionary projects, like Beam Me Down Music.
Beam Me Down is a NFT multi-edition collection that started off as a satirical project ie ‘the world is so F’d we could use some alien intervention’. This collection of “generative” spaceships would beam down up the bullshit and beam down music as a regenerative property.
Then Roe v Wade happened and the Beam Me Down became politicized and reoriented itself to benefit women’s rights as a collection. Web3 has already proved it can raise money, but what impact can be had using Web3 tools?
I wanted Web3 tech to be a tool for protest. But how? At the time I had reconnected with an old friend from the NYC music scene, Jasper James, who now is Co-chair for Northern California’s ACLU and founder of Social Justice as Spiritual Practice (SJSP). SJSP brilliantly used the feminist principle to think differently about protest so that it would be more effective, accessible, and safe. At its core, it challenged how we emotionally manage and manifest what we want and subversively protected protestors by making SJSP a legal religion whose main tenement was the practice of protest. Smart. We started working together to play with how Web3 tech could help and Beam Me Down was transformed from an NFT collection of AR art that could perform political theater, provide better accessibility, and was safe and easy to operate as a protest tool. We could creatively use the collection and manifest an invasion of AR Spaceships that beamed down the music and the message.
I’ll dive more into SJSP and the creative politics of Beam Me Down Music in future articles, but at that moment, being reminded of my own feminist training and having taken a recent break from the abhorrent misogyny of Web3, I reoriented my mind to think outside the box with the subscription NFT protocol itself. How could it be used differently based on feminist principles and priorities?
Providing Affordability and Releasing Class Tension
So let’s wrap this first article up by addressing the first issue or problem our subscription protocol can address. The prices of music NFTs are ridiculous yall. And I say that as I set to mint my own music to help fundraise for this project’s founder😂
The music NFT market is what it is and all that it is; an extremely small market shaped by crypto holders who can afford to drop $300 or more on just a song. There are Dapp tools like Party Bids that allow people to collectively own a bluechip NFT, but, this is MUSIC!! How do you collectively own an album? This is still based on its potential to give a financial return at some point. To be 100, since when has music ever been a commodity that we flip, regardless of the tech, the culture is not here for it and neither am I. So there is no consensus on Value other than the inherit value of music itself which is subjective as your own reflection in the mirror.
So, what do you prioritize if a music NFT costs $300 and your water bill is half that? What Web3 deems affordable is a bad joke to the majority working class. But if a limited subscription is say 10 months long, then that subscription can easily become an installment plan. You can either pay in full upfront or over time.
But wait, the market, as it is, demands people pay in full at the drop date and they then expect to receive their NFT at that point of purchase. Installment plans most likely won’t work if people receive the NFT before fully paying for it. That will just feed into class archetypes and potentially compromise a project's financial bottom line.
Then like a bolt of feminist lightning, it came to me like Sojourner Truth bum-rushing the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio in 1851 with her “Aint I a woman” speech.
A Feminist Solution
The mint will happen at the end of the subscription period which solves more than one problem of economic accessibility and class tension. It allows us to play and reposition value over time. And value speculation is arguably the Achilles heel of NFT projects. We speculate value before the mint, based on what exactly? The team, roadmap, a cool idea, or concept? FOH! This, again, is directly linked to late 20th-century capitalism which always looks like white male mediocrity overvaluing their own ideas, the usual hype-fueled marketing machine, and in some cases behind-the-scenes market manipulation.
Unlock Protocol can be set up with subscription tiers. Beam Me Down will have 2. All will be equal in value and access.
1. Pay it all up front
OR
2. Pay it in even installments over the subscription period
If someone needs to pause their subscription they can jump back in before it ends.
You’re probably asking well what do people get within these 10 months? Is it just an installment plan? In the next article, I will dive into how to reposition value, the feminist way; what it looks like with Beam Me Down, and its potential to flip how music goes to market on the blockchain.
If you want to learn more and support the Beam Me Down Music NFT Collection and Beats Per Mint Protocol visit our Gitcoin page or contact founder, Hanifah Walidah at themintlistnft@gmail or on Twitter @newworldcurator
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